Northern Crusades

Northern Crusades, series of military campaigns carried out from the 12th to the 15th century in the eastern Baltic Sea region. The stated goal of these campaigns was to convert the local tribes from paganism to Christianity, although as the campaigns unfolded, other factors also played a part. The crusades were mostly waged by the rulers of Denmark, Poland, and Sweden, and German military orders, with papal approval. The most prominent of the German orders was the Teutonic Knights, a military monastic order.

Background

By the 12th century the lands around the eastern stretches of the Baltic were the only part of northern Europe still largely populated by pagans and resistant to Christianity. The local tribes were ethnically Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic and had a long history of resisting Christian missionary efforts, often violently.

Both religious and materialistic reasons played a part in these crusades. In addition to the stated goals of converting pagans and protecting Christians, rulers pursued their own self-interest in expanding their territories and increasing their wealth. The crusades received papal sanction in 1171, when Pope Alexander III issued a bull authorizing the use of force to protect Christian missions in the Baltic and also to expand the territory of Western Christianity to these regions.

A phased process

The Northern Crusades can be viewed as a series of wars that took place in five overlapping phases:

• Wendish Crusades (1147–85), in which German, Danish, and Polish armies subdued Wendish (West Slavic) tribes;
• Livonian and Estonian Crusades (1198–1290), in which the German military orders (Teutonic Knights and Sword Brothers, the latter eventually being absorbed by the former) conquered an area corresponding to present-day Latvia and Estonia;
• Prussian Crusades (1230–83), a successful campaign by the Teutonic Knights to subdue and convert the Prussian tribes;
• Lithuanian Crusades (1280–1435), an ultimately unsuccessful war by the Teutonic Knights against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; and
• Novgorod Crusades (1243–15th century), a series of clashes between Sweden and the Novgorod Republic. These differed from the other crusades in that the warring sides were both Christian (Catholic and Orthodox, respectively).

Legacy

The consequences of the Northern Crusades were extensive and long-lasting. Most immediately, they resulted in the virtual extermination of paganism in its last European stronghold. Politically, they were marked by the emergence of a unique entity: the Order State, a theocracy ruled directly by the Teutonic Knights. This state, which spanned an area stretching from present-day Poland to Estonia, flourished starting in the mid-13th century until it began to decline after its defeat by Polish and Lithuanian forces at the Battle of Tannenberg (Grunwald) in 1410. Its Prussian territories were absorbed by Poland in 1466, and its Estonian and Livonian ones were dissolved in 1561. Prussia—formerly a land of Baltic-speaking tribes—became thoroughly Germanized, while a Baltic German nobility and urban merchant class formed the local elites in the Order State and its successors. The Baltic Germans retained their social supremacy as late as the 19th century. The Northern Crusades also had the secondary effect of encouraging Lithuania to enter into a personal union with Poland for its own protection, an arrangement that eventually led to the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.